Hapag-Lloyd buys container ships amid high demand for sea transport. (picture alliance / dpa)
German shipping company Hapag-Lloyd is to buy six additional container ships to meet the rising demand for sea transport, the Hamburg-based firm announced on Tuesday.
The ordered ships can carry 23,500 shipping containers each, run on liquid natural gas (LNG) or traditional fuel and are to be delivered from 2024, Hapag-Lloyd said.
The order for the ships, which will be manufactured by South Korean Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering, costs 852 million dollars, the firm said.
Hapag-Lloyd already ordered six ships of the same size in December.
"With this new order we want to go another step towards modernizing our fleet - both with regards to the ship size as well as in terms of sustainability," Hapag-Lloyd chief Rold Habben Jansen said.
"At the same time we want to attend to the continuously high demand and lower our unit costs," he added.
Hapag-Lloyd is one of the most important container shipping companies worldwide, with a fleet of 241 ships that have a capacity of 1.7 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU).
Shipping companies worldwide are under pressure to become more sustainable and lower emissions.
Hapag-Lloyd is using LNG as an interim solution, as it has 15 to 25 per cent lower carbon emissions and 90 per cent lower emissions of sulphur dioxide and particles.
In the medium term, the firm wants to power its ships with synthetically created methane gas to become climate neutral.
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